I recently presented some aspects of the renewed Apache Cocoon power through its latest (and not yet completed) release, 3.0.
Today I am going to present some features of the Hippo Cocoon Toolkit, whose aim is to provide an alternative, Cocoon 3.0 based, toolkit for building front-end web sites while relying upon Hippo CMS and Repository.

I've recently come up to a very wicked problem in Syncope, and a saving blog post pointed me in the right direction:
Getting your persistence access right when working with background jobs in Spring can be tricky.

Some articles are already around about Apache Cocoon 3.0, a deep rewrite of an Apache project that is bringing to the community innovative concepts since 1998.
To be honest, the latest release is slowly approaching to a stable level, especially if compared to the wide spread and appreciation that 2.x series used to have - and still has, to a certain extent - all around the world.

HSQLDB is a very nice and complete all-Java DBMS, particularly useful when doing quick test-outs or maven tests.
A while ago, a bug has been discovered in release 2.0.0 that is causing issues with BLOB management: this is a considerable issue especially with @Lob fields in Hibernate.

After very good news I have reported before, this morning I have received a very pleasant e-mail saying that since today I have been accepted as member of the Apache Cocoon PMC. Wow, I am still astonished by all this new stuff :-)

Yesterday evening I had to print out a photo of my son: since the only ready PC in the neighbourhood was my brand new Linux powered laptop, I just plug in the USB cable of my HP Deskjet F300 all-in-one.

I come from four-in-a-row (very good) laptops made by mummy Apple: an iBook G3, a Powerbook G4, a MacBook Pro Core2Duo and another shining MacBook Pro, powered by dual-core i7 and SSD.
Because of some relevant changes in my work life (I'll write something about it in the near future), I had to return to my former company the latest laptop - with some regrets, however, it's a damn powerful machine.